In this original study, William Kuskin asks us to reconsider the relationship between literary form and historical period. Kuskin suggests that modernity is far from a distinct historical category but is profoundly contingent on the Middle Ages. He sets out a compelling critique of the modernist literary-history paradigm of linear chronology and rupture, and makes an engaging case for "recursion" as a new principle by which literary historians can trace the presence of the "old" and the "new." Books, for Kuskin, are recursive: they imagine within themselves a return-to an earlier moment of writing, which, when read, they enact in the present. Recursive Origins will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval or Renaissance literature, the history of the book, medieval-Renaissance periodization, and theories of literary history.